Contact centers may monitor their own activity level and adjust their responses according to those levels. If contact center activity is unusually high, the contact center may forego certain time-intensive activities in favor of shortening each contact session and, hopefully, reduce any backlogs or increase the number of contact sessions. Conversely, during a period of low activity, the contact center may initiate additional or more time-intensive activities in order to better utilize contact center equipment and personnel.
One of the means by which contact centers determine activity is by wait times for contacts enqueued and waiting for a resource, such as an agent. In the case of telephony-based contacts, calls may roll over to a dedicated busy line, that is, a line that is used only when all other phone lines are in use and provides a busy signal to the caller.
Contact centers may also look to generalized environmental factors. For example, a contact center handling airline reservations may utilize a weather forecasting service. Upon determining a high likelihood of a major storm hitting the airline's hub, the contact center may anticipate higher contact center utilization as the airlines customers react to cancelled flights. Other factors include patterns associated with time, day, date or season and the historical level activity associated therewith.
Despite considering many factors, contact centers can still find themselves unaware of a change in the level of activity or the type of activity.